How 9/11 conspiracy theories moved into mainstream American politics

Type the words “9/11 conspiracy theories” into the search bar of YouTube, and there is no shortage of people lining up to tell you what “really” happened.

There are countless videos of commentators like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson giving their hot takes, alongside a seemingly limitless collection of video accounts blaming the CIA, the “deep state”, or the Illuminati. “Inside Job?” reads the thumbnail of one video that has been viewed more than 500,000 times, before it zooms in on footage of the World Trade Center’s two towers on fire on September 11, 2001.

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Twenty-five years after two planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York City, killing nearly 3,000 people, the conspiracy theories are still going strong. If anything, they have only continued to gain pace and mutate. While conspiracy theories were once associated with slightly odd people in tin-foil hats swapping improbable theories from their mothers’ basements, since 2016, when “post-truth” was named Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year, they have become an uncomfortable part of our political culture, experts say.

In an era of “fake news”, the declining trust in traditional media and government has seen conspiracy theories increasingly collide with mainstream politics – from QAnon to false claims of a stolen 2020 US election that helped fuel the January 6 assault on the US Capitol by disgruntled supporters of presidential candidate Donald Trump. More recently, a new wave of entirely unsubstantiated claims accusing Israel of involvement in the September 11 attacks has gained traction online, recycling older theories and riding on a wave of contemporary anger over Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and public perception of its influence on United States politics.

As a result, conspiracy theories have moved from the political fringes towards the mainstream, offering false explanations for real-world anxieties, and increasingly becoming a tool of far-right politicians to exploit grievances for their own political ends.

A magnet for conspiracy theories

Suspicion of the state has deep roots in American political culture. Decades before the events of 9/11, unanswered questions about the assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963 fuelled a sprawling collection of theories about who was really responsible.

But 9/11 was different. The attacks unfolded live on television, turning an event that triggered extraordinary fear and uncertainty into a spectacle witnessed in real time around the world. The event “was captured instantaneously”, noted Hugo Drochon, an associate professor of political theory at the University of Nottingham.

“People saw it on television,” said Drochon. “The United States was at the centre of the world, and this was the great shock. There was also a spectacle element to it – hijacking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center. It marked a certain generation.”

The attacks were then followed by two wars that would further shape mistrust of the US government. Less than a month after the September 11 attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan. In March 2003, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq under the – now disproven – claims that its leader, Saddam Hussein, was holding “weapons of mass destruction”. No such weapons were subsequently found.

Ultimately, lies told by the government – as the weapons of mass destruction claim was widely viewed by critics – fuelled a rise in conspiracy theories.

“Lying creates distrust, and there is a correlation between distrust and belief in conspiracy theories,” Drochon said.

Moreover, the past quarter century has also seen a rapid change in the way that people consume information. The September 11 attacks were perhaps the first event of this scale to unfold simultaneously through 24-hour rolling television coverage and within an emerging internet culture.

“The early conspiracy theories emerged at the same time as cable news and rolling news,” David Robertson, a lecturer and expert in conspiracy theories, told Al Jazeera.

“With 9/11, people were watching the coverage as it happened. That created opportunities for people to pick out apparent loopholes in the evidence and debate them, particularly with the growth of the internet.”

YouTube, launched just four years after the attacks, provided a new platform on which those theories could grow and flourish. Films such as Loose Change, which alleged the attacks were orchestrated or “allowed” to happen by elements within the US government, reached enormous audiences online, while false claims that the World Trade Center towers had been brought down in controlled demolitions developed their own sprawling internet communities.

Emergency personnel tend to injured people in Liberty State Park, in Jersey City, New Jersey, after two hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, causing both 110-storey landmarks to collapse in lower Manhattan, across the Hudson River [File: Miguel Juarez/Reuters]

‘Post-truth’ and fake news

“Conspiracy theories have always been there,” noted Drochon. “What changed was the moment when politicians started to actively use conspiracy theories as a political weapon.”

That moment came in 2016, the year Donald Trump was campaigning for his first term in the White House.

Trump had already built part of his national political profile by promoting the false “birther” conspiracy theory that Barack Obama, the first Black US president, had not been born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to hold office. After he became president, Trump repeatedly embraced or amplified other conspiracy theories and conspiratorial claims. He promoted allegations of a “deep state” working against him, and amplified accounts linked to QAnon, the far-right political and conspiracy theory movement that emerged in the US in 2017.

According to Drochon, Trump’s appeal to people who lapped up conspiracy theories galvanised a new voter base of people who were traditionally less politically engaged. “Trump activated those kinds of voters. You had certain people coming out to vote who had not voted previously. You saw something similar in the case of Brexit,” Drochon said, referring to the referendum in the United Kingdom – also in 2016 – that saw more than half of voters opting to leave the European Union (EU).

At the same time, the relatively new social media ecosystem had transformed the speed and scale at which such claims could circulate. “Social media allows conspiracy theories to thrive and makes them more prominent,” Drochon said.

“Linked to that, you have politicians who have seized upon them. That creates a vicious circle: the theories gain greater visibility because politicians repeat them, and people then take them more seriously because they appear to explain political developments such as Trump.”

As fake news somehow became gospel truth, Trump’s devoted “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) voter base repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that widespread election fraud had cost him the 2020 presidential election. On January 6, 2021, a mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol as Congress met to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. QAnon imagery and slogans were visible among the throng that entered the building.

The episode demonstrated that conspiratorial claims circulating online could be amplified by people at the highest levels of political power and fuel real-world political action. “People can use them for nefarious purposes,” Drochon noted. “They are a threat when the most powerful political actors adopt them.”

How the 9/11 conspiracy theories came around again

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Donald Trump is once again at the centre of American politics and is, once again, telling his own version of what happened in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

Speaking at a commemoration event this week, the US president claimed firefighters had carried him away from Ground Zero, where he says he had arrived with workers to assist with rescue efforts, over fears a nearby building could collapse. “Two firemen, big strong guys – and I’m not the smallest guy in the world – they grabbed me under the arm, said: ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up,” the Republican president claimed.

It was hardly the first time Trump had inserted himself into the story of 9/11 – or made disputed claims about the attacks. Ahead of his first presidential campaign, in November 2015, Trump claimed he had watched “thousands and thousands” of people in Jersey City cheering as the World Trade Center came down. No evidence has ever emerged to substantiate this account.

In September 2019, Trump shared a video falsely claiming US Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat, was dancing on the anniversary of 9/11, writing: “The new face of the Democrat Party!” The footage was actually from a Congressional Black Caucus event held on a completely different day.

Several people in Trump’s immediate orbit have also pushed 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Republican former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene at one time questioned whether a third 9/11 plane had ever struck the US Pentagon in Alexandria, Virginia, killing nearly 200 people in addition to those who died in New York City. Greene later acknowledged she was wrong to make this claim.

Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who has become an influential Trump ally, has shared a video describing 9/11 as an “inside job”.

Alex Jones, who Trump lavished praise on during his 2016 presidential bid, is the founder of the right-wing Infowars platform and a conspiracy theorist who was ordered to pay millions in compensation to the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which he claimed was a hoax that had been staged. He has also long promoted claims that the World Trade Center was brought down through “controlled demolition”.

Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential broadcasters on the American right, has also repeatedly questioned the official explanation for the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

More recently, Carlson’s focus has shifted towards another strand of 9/11 conspiracy theories – claims implicating Israel.

“We’ll declassify the 9/11 files. And then all those people on the internet were like, ‘Oh, the dancing Israelis. They did it. Israel had foreknowledge of 9/11.’ There were text messages sent to Israel, warning of 9/11. All true, by the way,” Carlson said in March.

His argument is that Israel may have been motivated to withhold information about the attacks in order to draw the US into conflicts in the Middle East, thus serving Israeli interests. The claims are unsupported, but that hasn’t stopped influential figures on the American right from making ample use of them. And it illustrates how conspiracy theories can mutate with the politics around them.

As support for Israel has fallen sharply among Americans amid the genocidal war on Gaza and the US-Israel war on Iran, some political analysts have pointed to Carlson as an example of how figures on the right have shifted with it. After building much of his career at Fox News defending Israel, Carlson has changed direction dramatically as anger over US support for Israel has grown.

And, with conspiracy theories already deeply embedded within large parts of the MAGA movement, Carlson has increasingly channelled genuine grievances over Gaza into unsupported claims implicating Israel in 9/11 – claims that are likely to find a receptive audience among the conspiratorial elements of Trump’s base.

“Conspiracy theories have always represented a potential threat, but at the moment that threat is particularly visible because the people promoting them are no longer simply on the fringes,” Drochon said.

“Some conspiracy theorists are among the most powerful people in the world.”